Farrah's ofHarrogate

Farrah's traces its Harrogate toffee back to 1840, when Joseph and Esther Farrah began regular production of a barley-sugar and butterscotch recipe originally devised to mask the taste of the town's sulphurous spa water. Their son John Farrah registered the recipe as Farrah's Harrogate Toffee in 1887 and built the family firm that carries his name. After passing through the Armitage and Waddington families, the business was bought back from the brink of closure in 1997 by father and son Gary and Peter Marston. Its food hall opened in 2004 at 29 Montpellier Parade, in Harrogate's Montpellier Quarter, where a sixteen-foot chocolate counter holds close to a hundred chocolate varieties and twelve fudges, with the Palm Court Café upstairs. The shop is Farrah's single Harrogate retail site.